Artistic Works Inspired By McLean
One popular and anecdotal history of McLean is Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital (ISBN 1-891620-75-4). More factual and scholarly accounts of the history are recorded in the Little and Sutton books listed below. Memoirs of time spent within McLean's walls include Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (ISBN 0-679-74604-8), which was made into a movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Samuel Shem's roman à clef Mount Misery tells a story inspired at least in part by the author's experiences at McLean. The 1994 Under Observation: Life Inside A Mental Hospital (ISBN 0-14-025147-2, ISBN 0-395-63413-X) by Lisa Berger and Alexander Vuckovic uses some fictional techniques (composite characters, etc.) to describe some of the typical events at Mclean. James Taylor's "Knockin' 'Round the Zoo" recalls his stay at McLean as a teenager. Douglas S. Holder, who ran poetry groups in inpatient wards for over a decade, published Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward. In 2010, Francis de Marneffe, M.D. published his memoirs McLean Hospital: A Personal Memoir about his career-spanning time at McLean, from Residency to Psychiatrist-in-Chief.
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Famous quotes containing the words artistic, works and/or inspired:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Phlegmatic natures can be inspired to enthusiasm only by being made into fanatics.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)